Rome, the Greek World, and the East: Volume 1: The Roman Republic and the Augustan Revolution

Author’s Prologue

For someone who claims to be a historian of the ancient world, to look both back on what he himself has written and forward to what might be written by others is salutary and stimulating, but also disturbing. For a start, what we conventionally call the ancient world, namely the Mediterranean and the areas which were in contact with it, from the second millennium B.C. to (perhaps) the reign of Justinian or the early Islamic conquests, was not the world at all, but only a modest part of it. Central Asia, Afghanistan, the Indian sub-continent, and Sri Lanka do indeed come into the story. But the northern part of the Eurasian landmass only does so very obscurely and indirectly, while China, Japan, south-east Asia, and the early history of human habitation in Australia and sub-Saharan Africa, as in the Americas, are entirely outside what is meant by the ancient world in this sense.

More clearly still, Graeco-Roman history, far from being ancient, is, comparatively speaking, the study of a very recent phase of human history. Humans evolved several million years ago (perhaps some 7 million years) and had spread from Africa into south-east Asia by around a million years ago and into Europe half a million years ago. On present calculations, almost all parts of the world where humans now live, except some Pacific islands, had been populated by humans before the emergence of the first writing in the Greek language (though not yet in the Greek alphabet) in the second millennium B.C. If we think in the categories of time and space, by far the larger part of the ancient history of humans is pre-history, illuminated by no written texts, and discernible now only through its physical remains.

To realise how recent and how close, in every sense, to ourselves, the Graeco-Roman ancient world is, is both disconcerting and encouraging. Disconcerting, because the study of that ancient world is revealed as a parochial pursuit, in which the danger is that everything from the structure of the languages involved, to the two main alphabets, to literary forms, architecture, political formations or philosophical ideas, will seem too readily accessible and intelligible. It is so, as is obvious, not only because of the dependence of Western civilisation on that of the Graeco-Roman world, but because it is all so close to us in time. To put it in graphic terms, if we look back from the end of our second, Christian, millennium, the lifetimes of a mere twenty-five people aged eighty, imagined as following in sequence on each other, would take us back to the reign of Augustus and the birth of Jesus. Even the legendary date of the Trojan War is, in these terms, only some forty lifetimes away, while the Islamic conquest of Syria and the Near East in the seventh century is a mere seventeen.

The Graeco-Roman ancient historian therefore needs a dose of modesty and an awareness of just how much more is involved in the genuinely ancient history of humans, and of how much had already happened before his or her subject matter comes into view, even in that limited part of the world in which Graeco-Roman history took place, or with which the classical world had connections.

Many readers will have begun to suspect, rightly, that these very general thoughts owe everything to the seminal work by Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel.¹ This reading indeed has given me a sense of how parochial our activities as ancient historians are, and in that sense it is certainly disconcerting. In other senses, however, it is not. For, firstly, one of the central messages of the book is the overwhelming importance of the possession, or absence, of inherited capacities, and inherited physical and technical resources, for the contacts and conflicts between different societies. But, for the moment, I want to leave that theme aside, to look at two other themes which emerge from Diamond’s study of early human evolution, both of them fundamental to seeing Graeco-Roman ancient history in perspective. One is the very restricted and limited nature of the domestication of plants and animals, and the other is the immense importance of lateral communications from east to west across the Eurasian landmass. In a way which is quite striking, and indeed encouraging, to the conventional ancient historian, the study of the earliest domestication of food plants (wheat, peas, olives) and of animals (sheep and goats) gives a crucial predominance to the Fertile Crescent, where these developments may have occurred around 8500 B.C., or some 10,000 years or more ago. The adoption of these domesticated crops and animals in the Mediterranean zone and Europe seems to have been a function of their dissemination from the Fertile Crescent, and to have taken place between 6000 and 3500 B.C. In an extraordinary way, therefore, we can now discern the real roots and origins of Western civilisation, which are mirrored in the mythical story of Abraham, and his migration from Mesopotamia to the Holy Land, there to serve as the founder figure of a sacred story which, diffused in Greek and Latin as Christianity, would embrace all of the Mediterranean zone and Europe; and, transmitted into Arabic, would travel back across the Eurasian landmass to Iran, Central Asia, India, and south-east Asia.

More particularly, the story, or rather the set of different stories, told by Jared Diamond, focusing, as regards the early period, on the basic features of human exploitation of the plant and animal world, ought to serve to invite historians of the Graeco-Roman world also to go back literally to basics. The first question to ask might then be: off what stock of plants did communities which spoke Greek or Latin in fact live, and how were these plants grown and harvested, and their products stored and cooked? The second concerns animals. One of the most striking messages of Diamond’s book is also how narrow and limited, at all times, has been the range of animals which have genuinely been domesticated and bred, to be used for food, clothing, leather, carrying burdens, pulling wheeled carts or sledges or ploughs, and war.

The question of diet and food supply has at least now been brought firmly to the attention of classical ancient historians, above all in the work of Peter Garnsey,² while the late Joan Frayn opened up quite new perspectives in making us think about wild and cultivated plants, or about sheep-rearing and the wool trade.³ There is no need to multiply examples: all that is underscored here is the need for awareness, on the part of those whose access to the classical world is essentially mediated through words, of the desirability of understanding the terms of human interaction with, and exploitation of, the natural world. Of course, in that area too, we neither can nor should attempt to work without the aid of the words in which classical writers reflected this relationship, whether it is Galen’s treatise On the Properties of Foodstuffs,⁴ or the Naturalis Historia of Pliny the Elder. Mary Beagon’s study has shown that the Natural History has an intellectual structure, and is more than just a random assembly of items of evidence.⁵ But in fact we should not be wary of using the Natural History also as just that, as an endless series of sidelights on human interaction with and exploitation of, the varied components of the natural world, whether organic (plants, animals, and fish) or inorganic, which means above all metals and stone, as it took place in the classical world.

The latter theme is one area with which, at least as regards the era before there were guns, Jared Diamond’s infinitely stimulating and suggestive book does not really deal. That is to say, the evolution of tools, and with them the expansion of human capacity to dig, to quarry, to cut both wood and stone, and to construct wheeled vehicles, ships, houses, temples, and public buildings, as well as the ability to make weapons for killing animals and other humans, both at close quarters and at a distance.

Yet, even if it were the case that we possessed no literary record (transmitted through medieval manuscripts) of the classical world, and had no idea of its history as constructed by those who wrote within it, the arrival, evolution, and spread—over most of the area from Hadrian’s Wall to Afghanistan—of a very distinctive material culture would be clearly visible in the archaeological record. For what that record would show first of all is a vast production of manufactured objects, particularly pottery vessels and containers of innumerable kinds, accompanied by a high level of construction in stone, of both private and monumental communal buildings, and by representational art, coins bearing both words and images (of which there must literally be millions now preserved), and documents inscribed on stone or bronze, or on perishable materials. In the case of written texts in many of the languages involved—for instance (obviously), Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac—no complex process of decipherment, such as there is with Akkadian, would even be necessary. For in these languages the letter forms, the grammar, and much of the vocabulary are essentially still current today.

Of course this picture of a hypothetical re-discovery de novo of a hitherto unknown classical world, known only from archaeology, is a fantasy, because the close connections between it and ourselves are a function of the fact both that the classical world itself evolved an elaborate literature, and that subsequent generations have not only never lost contact with that literature, but have been profoundly shaped by contact with it. If nothing else, there has never been a break in the cultural history of the Near East, the Mediterranean and Europe, of a sort which would have led to a break in the continuous reading of the Bible, in Hebrew, in Greek, and in Latin. It should be stressed that all three of these versions of the Bible, as canonical assemblages of texts, are products of the classical world: the latest book of the Hebrew Bible (Daniel), was composed in the second century B.C., and the Hellenistic period saw the translation of it, and of all the other books, into Greek; and both the Old Latin and the Vulgate, as Latin versions of the Bible, are products of the Roman Empire.

The fact that continuous use of texts, pagan and Christian, in Greek and Latin, links us directly to the classical world, and that there is no way in which we either can escape their influence or should seek to, does not mean that we should not try to look beyond them, to discern the material development of human life and settlement in the whole vast range of different areas which at one time or another came within the orbit of Graeco-Roman civilisation. Vast regions of the Graeco-Roman world are in any case hardly illuminated by any literary texts, or, if they are so at all, it is only by passing allusions to peripheral societies made by writers from the main stream of the classical tradition. A total history of human society in all the areas concerned, from southern Scotland to northern India—something which is currently (and for all foreseeable futures) completely unattainable—would have to encompass the fundamental issues of nutrition and of interactions with the physical world with which I began, and would involve an understanding of an immense series of complex questions: health, patterns of disease, expectation of life, demography, family structure, housing, and sanitation. Beyond these would lie the question of dependence on household production for subsistence, or alternatively of access to markets for food, and dependence or otherwise on the market for access to manufactured goods, furniture, or clothing. As indicated already, virtually the entire geographical area which saw the flourishing of Graeco-Roman civilisation, a period which in terms of human history is very recent indeed, has left a vast stock of physical evidence, from potsherds to buildings to organic remains, which is potentially relevant to all these questions. But one need only sketch the ideal of answering fundamental questions of human life in the way suggested to make it obvious that all that can be hoped for at the moment is partial studies, often of what are in fact very small archaeological sites, and which at best can give only very limited and localised answers.

None the less, the purpose of spelling out these unattainable ideals is that the wider background of our almost all-embracing ignorance should be kept in mind when we think of the more limited, but still enormously extensive, evidence which we do have—evidence which is accessible, which in itself can be understood, and which will yield at least partial and suggestive answers to major questions.

For instance, the physical remains of construction, from the foundations of small huts to the Pantheon in Rome, with its dome still complete as Hadrian built it, can be found almost anywhere in the area covered by Graeco-Roman civilisation. In Diamond’s picture of the relative capacities of different societies, the topic of quarrying, stonecutting, the carving of decoration in stone, and the haulage of stone to the intended sites for building might have played a larger part. We can think of this area of enquiry as an aspect of the history of technology, or of education and training (how was it possible, in so many modest local contexts, to train generations of stonecutters, who could cut marble for use in building, or produce elaborate marble sarcophagi by the thousand?), or of artistic styles. But quarrying too is a fundamental aspect of the interaction of humans with the natural world, brilliantly explored, for instance, in a recently published geological companion to Greece.⁶

But sanctuaries, cemeteries, villages, and cities are of course not only the product of physical efforts and technological skills, but are expressions of the values and priorities of the societies which produced them, and can be read and interpreted in a way quite similar to the interpretation of written texts—which is, of course, to say also that, by the nature of interpretation, they can be read and interpreted wrongly, or at any rate in ways which have no defensible logical foundation. But here again, it would be futile and counter-productive to pretend that we either can, or should attempt to, read buildings and urban landscapes without doing so in the light of what is recorded of them in literary or documentary texts. Interpretation of physical remains in terms set by the ancient literary tradition has its dangers, of course, above all that of failing to distinguish what we are told in words from what is actually to be seen and encountered on the relevant site now.⁷ But the fact remains that some of the most successful advances in understanding during the past few decades have involved the interpretation of architectural complexes and of urban landscapes through the combination of literary, archaeological, and documentary evidence. One may think for instance of what is (very surprisingly) the first overall attempt to interpret the history, function, and meaning of the Athenian Acropolis and the buildings on it.⁸ But the prime case, extremely relevant to at least some of the essays in this volume, must be the study of ancient Rome itself. In terms of style of approach and of interpretation, the tone has been set by Filippo Coarelli, whose work is not essentially archaeological, in the sense of the excavation and analysis of objects, but interpretative, in combining very detailed topographical knowledge, and a profound sense of place, with the use of written evidence. This, above all, has brought the Roman Forum to life as never before.⁹ In parallel with this has come the new direction given to the study of Roman history by the combination of history, architectural history, art history, iconography, and topography in Paul Zanker’s classic work on the power of images in the reign of Augustus.¹⁰ This approach has now found its most systematic expression in the triumphant production, all within the last decade of the century, of the six volumes of Margareta Steinby’s Lexicon Topographicum of the city of Rome.¹¹

If the reader were to look at the articles collected in this volume in the order of the dates of their original publication, and not, as they are in fact arranged, in the chronological order of the subjects which they cover, he or she would see at least a pale reflection of the revolution of perception which has affected Roman history. That is to say, the earlier papers are wholly dependent on written evidence, literary or documentary, and show absolutely no sense of the physical or symbolic environment against which the narrative of Roman history is set. I hope at least that the reader would detect a change in the mid-1980s, as a direct consequence of a month spent in 1983 at the British School in Rome, walking around the city with Filippo Coarelli’s Guida Archeologica di Roma in hand. The effect is (I hope) clearly visible in chapter 4, The Political Character of the Classical Roman Republic, 200–151 B.C., and chapter 12, State and Subject: The Impact of Monarchy, both published in 1984.

The latter essay makes some allusions to numismatic evidence and uses the excellent British Museum pamphlet on Augustus, published in 1981.¹² But here the scene has been completely transformed in the 1990s by the publication of a work whose significance has perhaps still not been fully felt. I refer to the first volume of Roman Provincial Coinage, covering the period 44 B.C.–A.D. 69.¹³ Now for the first time, it is possible to read the images and the written legends presented by the entire range of local coinages in the Graeco-Roman world over the crucial period of the establishment of monarchic rule in Rome. The coinages of the different local communities reveal at once the transformation of the symbolic landscapes—even, one might say, the imagined communities—to which they now belonged: each community representing itself as something with an independent political identity; but nearly all explicitly reflecting the existence at the centre of a single ruler, whose image is reproduced almost everywhere.

To collect and display the coins in this way is, of course, deliberately to give priority to their explicit messages, expressed in words and in images. But, to revert to a theme touched on earlier, coins, like other physical products of ancient societies, belong in several different fields of enquiry. Once again, there is the human interaction with the physical world: the mining, smelting, and transport of base metals, silver or gold; and then the design of type faces, and the production of the coins (one should not say production by a mint, or still less by the mint of city x, for no one can define what, if anything, a mint in antiquity was). But there is also the question of volume of production, of circulation, and, beyond that, the problem of whether we should see economic relations at all levels in the Graeco-Roman world as having been monetised.¹⁴ Monetised will mean two things, not entirely identical: the expression of value in terms of coin (two denarii, one million sesterces); and the question of whether everyone had access to coins in circulation, with which they would make payments. These issues arise in a profound way and are very far from being solved, as regards the extraction of value by the Roman state in the form of taxation, and its subsequent redeployment, mainly in payments to soldiers. How far were these obligatory exchanges of value conducted by the use of coin?¹⁵ Moreover, given that there was no paper money, and no system of credit transfer on paper, and that therefore the physical transport of coin around the empire was necessary, how was this achieved? This issue brings us back once again to the evolution of physical resources and capacities: the construction of wheeled waggons, and the employment of animals for traction; and the role of shipping for official transport, as well as for wider economic exchanges.

Some brief remarks on the minting and redistribution of coins are made in another essay, Cash Distributions in Rome and Imperial Minting, which appears for the first time in English as chapter 7 of volume 2. But in general it would have to be acknowledged that the work collected in these three volumes does not deal with the physical bases of human life in Graeco-Roman antiquity, or with economic history, or with state finance, in the sense of the exchange of value between subject and state. The only, partial, exception is that one essay, chapter 9, in this volume, The Mediterranean and the Roman Revolution: Politics, War, and the Economy, does sketch some aspects of how this exchange worked in the erratic, violent, and fluctuating circumstances of the end of the Roman Republic.

War was in fact endemic in the Graeco-Roman world until we reach the Roman Empire. This was true of the Greek city-states, as it was of what in effect was an under-recognised category of city-states, those of Italy in the first millennium B.C. War was certainly endemic in all the barbarian societies which bordered on the Graeco-Roman area, as it was equally in the Persian Empire and the Phoenician-Punic world of the central and western Mediterranean in the period up to the achievement of Roman domination in the second century B.C. As a masterly article by Michel Austin has shown, military ambition was integral also to the nature of the Hellenistic kingdoms.¹⁶ Discussion of Roman imperialism in the Republic, fundamental though some recent studies have been,¹⁷ has perhaps not been conducted with sufficiently explicit attention to the fact that the Romans were not the only imperialists who were currently active: Pyrrhus, Hannibal, Philip V, Antiochus III, Mithridates, Tigranes of Armenia, and Cleopatra were all in the business of the active expansion of the areas under their control. It is certainly the case also that, if we look at the Greek city as a political and communal structure, far more attention has gone to the citizen as voter, official, or juror than to the citizen as soldier.¹⁸

But all ancient political communities were in fact by their nature military organisations, and it is one of the most significant aspects of the originality of Polybius that, in thinking about the Roman politeia in book 6, he gives a large amount of space to the organisation of the Roman army. I have been as guilty as most others of not wanting to make wars and armies the focus of my attention; and, insofar as military history and military structures play any part in these volumes, it is more as a general context than as serious topics in their own right. But, it should be emphasised here that, right down to the battle of Actium, not just the major powers but, as it seems, every small community within their shadow had to be prepared to exert itself in its own defence.

In default of any other serious attention to military history, I would like to suggest that we ought at least to ask ourselves whether it is not the battle of Actium (rather than, say, the conquests of Alexander and the emergence of the Hellenistic monarchies) which marks the most significant turning point in the history of the Greek city-state. For up to Actium (it seems) Greek cities might still be under the necessity to produce military or naval forces, for their own protection or in the service of others; but after Actium (or so it seems) this essential communal function simply vanishes, at least until the drastically changed circumstances of the third century. A similar change, of immense importance, was one of the most profound consequences of the Social War of 90–87 B.C., and of the extension of Roman citizenship to all the communities of Italy. For this was the moment at which the allied communities of Italy, and the coloniae Latinae, ceased to provide and pay for their own contingents for the Roman army. Instead, their men were drafted into the Roman legions. I will return to this theme very briefly later, in looking more closely at the topic of the chapters in this volume, Roman history of the Republican and Augustan periods. But it will be worth noting here that the military and naval roles of Greek poleis in the late Republic on the one hand, and of Italian civitates up to the Social War, but not after, are specifically compared by Cicero in the fifth Verrine oration, written in the summer of 70 B.C.¹⁹ So far as I know, no provincial governor under the Empire had the specific opportunities for malpractice which his deployment of ships provided by the Greek cities of Sicily offered to Verres. One key element in the relations between provincial communities and the ruling power had changed, and at the same time (as it seems) the military role of the self-governing community had disappeared.

That role has never been fully explored, nor have the consequences of its end been examined. I stress it here only to emphasise that I believe it to be important, and also (once again) to indicate that it is not among the topics covered in the chapters of this volume, or, in any significant way, in the two following ones.

The subject of all three volumes could be summed up as the communal culture and civil government of the Graeco-Roman world, essentially from the Hellenistic period to the fifth century A.D. In one sense at least, as the author of the articles and review articles assembled as chapters in these three volumes, I have to admit that both the questions asked in them and the material deployed to answer these questions are traditional and even old-fashioned. They show expertise neither in the biological and demographic history of mankind over the seven or eight centuries concerned, nor in the material evidence, nor, except in a very modest and peripheral way, in urbanism, architecture, or visual imagery. The evidence used is fundamentally that provided by words, whether literary texts reaching us through medieval manuscripts, or original documents, inscriptions above all, but also papyri and coin legends. If any originality can be claimed, it is not as such in the type of material used, namely the written word, but in the extension of the cultural and linguistic range of the written words concerned, to cover Jewish literary sources and documents in Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, as well as material in other Semitic languages—for instance, Palmyrene and Nabataean inscriptions, and Syriac documents (inscriptions and parchments) and literary texts. But the theme of the co-existence and interpenetration of cultures and traditions in the Near East, of the interpretation of classical and Jewish traditions, and of the early stages of Arab self-identification in terms of descent from Abraham, belongs in volume 3. For the moment, it will be enough to call attention to an article by Hannah Cotton, Walter Cockle, and myself, which it was not appropriate to include in these volumes, and which surveys the papyrology of the Near East in the imperial period.²⁰ It may be worth noting that the texts listed there include examples in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Jewish Aramaic, Nabataean, Palmyrene, and Syriac. To me, it must be said, the Near East represents the most significant part of my work, and, if fate allows, I hope after all to return to its history in the period between Constantine and Mohamed.

Within the strictly Graeco-Roman sphere, and accepting that the articles collected here derive fundamentally from written material, literary and documentary, it would also have to be admitted that many major themes of contemporary historiography have found no place, or very little: pagan religion, magic, women’s history or gender studies, or the history of medicine, either as an applied art, or as encompassing a significant proportion of the literary texts surviving from antiquity, or as containing immensely important material, both for social history and for ancient conceptions of the body and the human self.²¹ On reflection, there are not many excuses for this. For, unexpected as it may seem, when I began graduate work in 1958 under the late Sir Ronald Syme, with the idea of writing a thesis on Cassius Dio,²² the first work I was told to read was the classic article of 1905 by J. Ilberg, Aus Galens Praxis.²³

Ronald Syme was an inspiring supervisor, to whom I owe an enormous debt. But I cannot pretend ever to have been consumed by his passion for prosopography and the history of families, in either of its two main manifestations. One was the study of careers in the imperial period, above all as recorded in thousands of honorific inscriptions. The other main manifestation was, of course, in the political history of the Republic and the Augustan period, and the focus which has been of central importance in the writing of classical Roman history throughout the twentieth century on the Senate and on the nobility, or aristocracy, which was believed to have dominated it, and which in the end compromised with remarkable ease with the monarchic regime of Augustus.²⁴

Here, to come finally to the specific subject matter of this volume, it is obvious that my work on Roman history has, broadly speaking, taken not merely a different direction from that of Ronald Syme, but in many respects one which runs directly counter to his. In case it needs saying, this has never been seen by me, and was never seen by him during his life, as representing any sort of personal challenge or conflict. So far as he was concerned, as he always made clear, if someone had something to say, that was fine, and all the more so if what was written showed some sense of style or of the capacity for structure and composition. So far as I was, and am, concerned, I could never hope to achieve a masterpiece of literary composition like The Roman Revolution (finished, it may be noted, when its author was thirty-five), am not a classicist in anything like the same sense, and suffer from the further crippling disadvantage that I find it impossible to remember details of family relationships and genealogy. I only trust that my turning away from interpretations resting on such relationships has been motivated by something more profound than simply not being able to remember who was whose cousin, or nephew, or brother-in-law.

There are however two very important aspects of The Roman Revolution in respect of which I would like to think that there is some continuity, rather than a sharp break. One is the intention to see Augustus and his reign very specifically through the literature of the period, and through the precise vocabulary in which views of it, by followers or by more detached observers, were expressed. The other was—in spite of Ronald Syme’s reputation as a passionate observer of the aristocracy—to widen enormously the cast of characters who could be perceived as having been participants in the Roman revolution, by bringing in the minor figures, down to centurions or local town councillors, mentioned in passing in literary sources or recorded on inscriptions, who played a part in the march of events, and perhaps gained, for themselves or their descendants, a place in the upper levels of Roman society. How many other books on the political history of the late Republic have found a place (Roman Revolution, 354) for T. Flavius Petro, from Reate, a Pompeian veteran? This was, of course, the grandfather of the emperor Vespasian.²⁵

This sense of a wider social range, and of the innumerable different petty localities from which men might come to play a part in the wider Roman system, is a major development in Roman history in the twentieth century, expressed for instance in Claude Nicolet’s first great work, on the equestrian order under the Republic,²⁶ and later in Ségolène Demougin’s remarkable study of the same status group under the Julio-Claudians.²⁷ Who would have imagined that our evidence would reveal the names of no less than 770 equites of that period?

The stage on which what we think of as Roman history can be seen being played out has thus become incomparably more populated than could possibly have been the case before the composition of the great works of prosopography which began in the late nineteenth century. This is not the place to list these, except perhaps to note the inception and completion of the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, covering the period from A.D. 260 to 641, begun soon after the Second World War, and reaching its last entry, Zudius, in volume IIIB, published in 1992.²⁸

Reference works in the field of prosopography, whether structured alphabetically, person by person, or as lists of office-holders, are an indispensable tool, which we now almost take for granted. But they can of course lead to an overestimate of the importance of the occupation of office, and can at the worst embody unquestioned assumptions which tend to equate the pursuit of office with the entire political process in the community concerned. The danger is even greater when the study of which individuals—or of which families over successive generations—held office is projected back into a period from which there is no contemporary literary or documentary evidence. In spite of the superlative scholarship displayed in Friedrich Münzer’s great work of 1920 on Roman noble parties and families, now translated for the first time into English,²⁹ and while doing honour to the tragic personal history of Münzer himself in the Nazi period,³⁰ it ought in my view to be acknowledged that the book served to stimulate a curiously distorted manner of seeing Roman republican history, and of interpreting the narratives of it which we have, which was to dominate the study of republican history for at least the next half century.

Of course the emphasis on competition for the consulship in Münzer’s work was not gratuitous, for it followed the lead given by our narrative sources themselves and, very notably, by the two great Augustan inscriptions, the Fasti Consulares and the Fasti Triumphales, which literally set in stone a certain view of the Roman past, in listing all those who had held triumphs, back to Romulus himself, and all the pairs of consuls since the foundation of the Republic. But to say that is to say that as texts these inscriptions are every bit as much ideological representations of the Roman past as Livy’s History, or Ovid’s Fasti, or the last part of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. As a text, the all-too-perfect listing of the supposed holders of the consulate in the fifth century B.C., each equipped with the praenomen of both his father and his grandfather, deserves to be studied as a literary construct, not as a documentary record; and as inscriptions, as Margareta Steinby’s study of the east side of the Forum showed, everything is uncertain about the original location, the conception, the date, and the function of both sets of Fasti.³¹

There is thus an organic connection between the Fasti, as a product of Augustan—or rather, in origin, pre-Augustan—culture, politics, and antiquarianism, and a great modern work like T. R. S. Broughton’s The Magistrates of the Roman Republic. The one leads to the other, and both represent choices in the construction of the past. As for the early Republic, the alleged sequences of named holders of major offices are an unreliable basis for historical reconstruction. For the later Republic we can accept that the data are essentially reliable. But they represent only one aspect of the political history of the wider community of Romans.

There is also another important aspect of prosopography which has played a large part in twentieth-century writing on Rome, and which is also directly rooted in the Romans’ perceptions of their own history. I mean by this the study of the very distinctive and important theme in Roman history and historiography, by which the category of Romans was not closed, but was repeatedly expanded to include ever wider groups, not forgetting all slaves legally freed by Roman citizens. This theme is expressed most prominently in the famous inscription from Lyon recording the speech in which the emperor Claudius urged the Senate to take a positive attitude to the admission of leading men from Gaul (who were themselves, by definition, already Roman citizens) into the Senate. Such a policy had been an aspect of the history of Rome from the very beginning, Claudius explained; and, more recently, Augustus and Tiberius had wished to see "the whole flower of the coloniae and municipia everywhere, provided that they were respectable men and rich, in this curia."³² This theme came very quickly to appeal to the young provincial from New Zealand, Ronald Syme, decades before it bore fruit in his two-volume work on Tacitus, published in 1958. The proof of this was provided in 1999 in the form of the publication of the original text of the study entitled The Provincial at Rome, which Syme had referred to, as begun but never completed, in the Preface to Tacitus. It bears the date 1934.³³

Such a prosopographical approach evidently formed an essential starting point for anyone who, like myself, began as a doctoral student under Ronald Syme, and (as it happens) in the same year as Tacitus was published. If we look at such an approach in the light of the much wider perspectives evoked earlier, the long-term demographic, institutional, medical, and geographical history of mankind, it will of course appear limited and conventional, closely tied to texts—literary or documentary—which are accessible only through an education in Greek or Latin. And, indeed, it not only seems relatively restricted, but is. Furthermore, a much wider approach—though nowhere coming close to the wider biological history of humans—had already been demonstrated before The Roman Revolution was published. By that I mean, of course, Rostovtzeff’s Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, first published in 1926. Once again, this is not the place to attempt to characterise Rostovtzeff’s work in detail, or to evoke the very active and creative studies of him, both in Russia and in the West, in the 1990s.³⁴ But it is relevant to stress that Rostovtzeff brought into a narrative of imperial history, firstly, a vast range of physical evidence, visited in situ or inspected in local museums; and secondly, an equally vast range of local documentary evidence, above all inscriptions and papyri. In that way he exploited innumerable local voices or testimonies as evidence for the wider history of the Empire. But Rostovtzeff was not just assembling data, he was telling a story. But that story, we should frankly admit, was in itself a quite conventional one, of growing prosperity and stability in the Empire up to the Antonine age, followed by a military monarchy and the beginnings of anarchy in the third century; in short, it is precisely the story told in the last part of the Roman History of Cassius Dio.

Rostovtzeff’s History was both the symbol and the first large-scale product of the revolution produced in the nature and scale of our access to the ancient world that had been made possible by the apparently dry labour of producing corpora of inscriptions and papyri, catalogues of coins, volumes of excavation reports, descriptions of buildings and categorisations of small finds which had gone on since the nineteenth century. Rostovtzeff’s own interests also embraced, if in very varying degrees of intensity, the whole geographical area of the Roman Empire and (as regards Asia) far beyond it.

The range and variety of possible historical approaches to the ancient world is thus now incomparably greater than was possible even a century ago. An infinity of different emphases, or starting points, is possible, from studying the rhetoric of Cicero or the biblical exegesis of Saint Jerome, or examining the literary character of Tacitus’ portrait of Tiberius, to assessing the organic remains from excavations as evidence for diet, surveying whole landscapes, excavating settlements, analysing the chemical composition of pottery, assembling the coins of a small Greek city, reading multilingual documents from the shores of the Dead Sea—or asking how, if at all, we can understand what we mean by Roman religion.

If I reflect on my own path within this trackless forest of possibilities, it is easy to see that the work done belongs very clearly, and fairly consistently, at a definable logical level. That is to say, it has been almost wholly dependent on verbal evidence, documentary and literary. But it nowhere approaches literary criticism in the proper sense, nor on the other hand has it been concerned with the initial publication of newly discovered documentary texts. The area of operation can thus be seen as stretching from strictly political history on the one hand, to political institutions and forms of behaviour, social values, and conceptions—and not least conceptions and expectations directed to rulers by those below them and in contact with them—to social life proper, in the sense in which it is accessible through literary and documentary texts. The arrangement of the studies in this volume, in the broad chronological sequence of the topics of periods covered, serves to obscure their chronological sequence in the other sense, the time of writing, which is not far from being the complete converse. That is to say, the earlier studies represented here focus on Augustus and his regime, and do so primarily through the medium of the way in which the new emperor, and his personal role, his form of government, and his actions, are conceptualised in contemporary literary and documentary texts. There is no need to rehearse any of this here. But I would wish to underscore one principle of method and one conclusion. The principle of method is in a sense a democratising one, or at any rate is concerned with seeing the imperial rule through the eyes, or at least the words, of as wide a geographical and social range of his subjects as the evidence allows. Put another way, it affirms that the emperor, conceived of as the addressee of a letter and decree of a Greek city, to be borne to him by ambassadors, is at least as validly the real emperor as the one represented in a later Latin narrative.

The one conclusion which may be worth re-stating here is that nothing anywhere in the evidence justifies the idea that it was ever claimed officially that Augustus had restored the republic in the sense of re-creating a republican system. It was, of course, claimed that the res publica had been restituta; but that is not the same thing. If anyone had wished to claim that Augustus had given up personal power, they might have said that the res publica had been reddita by him. But they did not, and could not have; and one of the most well-placed and well-informed of Augustus’ contemporaries, the geographer Strabo, said unambiguously the exact opposite: that his native land entrusted to him the care of the government, and he was established for life as master of war and peace.³⁵

The studies of the Republic in this volume have a rather different origin. One aspect of it has been touched on already: the experience of absorbing a sense of the topography of Rome in 1983. Otherwise, this sequence of studies of republican politics, culminating in my book on the crowd in Rome,³⁶ have a very different character from most of the rest of my work. For what is precisely lacking so far in our evidence for the Republic is, on the one hand, a mass of local documents expressing the identity and concerns of subordinate participants in a wider structure; and, on the other, a range of contemporary literary works written by observers who were not themselves at the heart of events. It is frustrating in many ways that the most explicit, detailed, and immediately revealing contemporary documents for republican history tend to come from the Greek East;³⁷ and among these an important place must go to the late Republican and Triumviral texts from Aphrodisias.³⁸ Also, major new documents remain to be fully studied: for instance, the extensive inscription on portoria from Ephesos; and, above all, the last legacy of the great Louis Robert, namely the two long inscriptions of leading citizens from Colophon who acted as intermediaries between their city and the Roman authorities in the early decades of the province of Asia.³⁹

These texts, of immense potential value, have (surprisingly) not been studied in great detail in the decade since their original publication. But what they serve to emphasise is also, by contrast, the dearth of literary and documentary voices from inside republican Italy—and, paradoxically perhaps, an even greater dearth from inside Rome itself. This is the great weakness of republican history, in spite of its endless fascination, the powerful narratives which record it, and the profound nature of its impact on the outside world, from Britain to Mesopotamia. It is also the reason why the influence of anthropology has not been felt in Roman history as it has in Greek. For, in order to be able to borrow (as we should) approaches developed in social anthropology, we require a society to apply them to, or at least one which we can convince ourselves that we can in some sense observe and understand. But when we speak of Roman society, what do we mean? The inhabitants of the city, about whose life we know almost nothing? Or of the vici which surrounded it? Or the citizen farmers occupying the territory stretching north across Italy to the Adriatic, or south-east to Campania? Or the people of small, ancient urban centres and political communities like Arpinum, enjoying a full dual citizenship, Roman and local, after 188 B.C.? The truth is that there is not even one of these several very contrasting component elements of the Roman citizen body of before 90 B.C. of which we can gain any serious conception at all.

This problem shows up perhaps most clearly of all when we discuss Roman religion—or the religions of Rome, as a remarkable and important recent work puts it.⁴⁰ For even this book concentrates on the evolution of cults and religious practices in the city of Rome itself. But what of the cults of Tusculum, or of the Sabine county, or Picenum? What temples were there in Arpinum, how were priests chosen, what was the form of their religious calendar? Even more profoundly, our view of Roman religion, in spite of the fact that most Roman citizens must have lived by agriculture, fails to give a central place to the offerings and prayers which a farmer was advised to carry out if he wanted his crops to flourish. Indeed, we hardly have any impression of the religious practice of agriculture at all except from Cato’s De agri cultura. One example will suffice:⁴¹

The following is the Roman formula to be observed in thinning a grove: A pig is to be sacrificed, and the following prayer uttered: Whether thou be god or goddess to whom this grove is dedicated, as it is thy right to receive a sacrifice of a pig for the thinning of this grove, and to this intent, whether I or one at my bidding do it, may it be rightly done. To this end, in offering this pig to thee I humbly beg that thou wilt be gracious and merciful to me, to my house and household, and to my children. Wilt thou deign to receive this pig which I offer thee to this end?

If you wish to till the ground, offer a second sacrifice in the same way, with the addition of the words: for the sake of doing this work. So long as the work continues, the ritual must be performed in some part of the land every day; and if you miss a day, or if public or domestic feast days intervene, a new offering must be made.

The effect of the limited nature of the evidence for the republican period, therefore, is that, instead of having the evidence to write a social history, in the light of which we could interpret the political narratives which we have, we have to use those narratives themselves (together, in Cicero’s time, with speeches, and the narratives contained within them) to construct a picture of the constitutional structure of the res publica, of the political relations which lay behind voting and elections, and of the structure of Roman society itself. Cato is exceptional in speaking of the religious life of the countryside at all. But it is typical that we owe even this testimony to the pen of an ex-consul writing for contemporary upper-class landowners.

If such limitations affect our knowledge of Roman society, in or near the city and out in the countryside and in small towns, it is even more true of the Latin communities of old Latium and of the coloniae Latinae, or of the very diverse groups who came under the heading of socii or foederati. What we can at least perceive through our narrative sources is in fact something very remarkable, namely the fact that the Italian peninsula in the republican period was a world without kings or hereditary aristocracies or castles. If we only had the evidence, republican Italy would claim a place, just as much as classical Greece, in the history of the self-governing city-state. It could not, of course, be proved that every Italian community had a functioning constitution and annual magistrates. But the progress of Italic epigraphy and the work of M. Cébeillac-Gervasoni and others has allowed us at least glimpses of these magistrates in office over large parts of the peninsula.⁴² None the less, we are still a long way from being able to see any Italian communities (Roman, Latin, or federate) from inside, or to understand what changes the extension of the Roman citizenship after the Social War will have brought about. One of these is mentioned earlier: the end of the military role of Latin and federate civitates, and the enrolment of their young men into the Roman legions. It is frustrating that it remains the case that the new situation of Italy, as something which approximated to a nation-state—what Augustus, looking back to 32 B.C., was to call tota Italia—is still best grasped through local copies of leges passed by the people in Rome, or, in the case of the Tabula Heracleensis, of a local compilation, then inscribed, of sections from different laws passed in Rome. None the less, the work done on these documents in recent years is of primary importance.⁴³

With the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, we suddenly enter a world where, in a certain sense, our evidence is transformed in scale and in the richness of the meanings which it conveys. This is true, clearly enough, of literature, both Latin and Greek; of the explosion of the epigraphic habit, also in both Latin and Greek; and, as mentioned earlier, of the huge range of local coins mirroring the predominance of the distant and largely unseen emperor. Even if Augustan literature hardly reveals to us the life of the broad masses of the population, its complexity as a cultural, ideological, and political product is sufficient to ensure that interpretation and reinterpretation will never run dry.⁴⁴ Moreover, this is one field of study which is truly inter-disciplinary, in the sense that physical and iconographic evidence, along with a flood of epigraphic material, can be brought into conjunction with the literary sources. It is also no surprise that we have ever more epigraphic sidelights on the imperial regime from the Greek world, from the relations of Miletos to Augustus, to a Bosporan king thanking one of the Greek cities of his kingdom for maintaining tranquillity while he was off to Rome to see the emperor.⁴⁵ But now older elements in the Latin epigraphic record—for instance, the two inscriptions from Pisa which give us the first detailed picture of the politics of a colonia—are now joined by long texts, composed in Rome, but dutifully inscribed in Italy or Baetica, which completely renew our sense of the institutions of Rome under the emperors, of contemporary conceptions of the Empire (themes touched on in chapters 15 and 16 in this volume), of the tone and language of deferential politics in a monarchic setting, and of the machinery of communication to Rome’s subjects. I refer of course to the two new, infinitely rich and complex, Latin epigraphic texts, the Tabula Siarensis and Tabula Hebana (overlapping epigraphic copies of a single original text), and the